By 1938, as anti-Semitism came to a boil in Germany, Canada began to actively restrict Jewish immigration.[
citation needed] Blair raised the amount of money immigrants had to possess to come to Canada from $5,000 to $15,000. As well, they had to be farmers, although most were coming from cities.
Blair followed the immigration regulations - many written by himself - to the letter and then boasted about his success in keeping Jews out of the country.
Canadian Jews held large demonstrations in the late 1930s pleading with their government to help, but to no avail. Senator
Cairine Wilson was one of the country's leading voices against fascism and one of the few non-Jews lobbying for the refugees. Wilson begged Prime Minister Mackenzie King to let in 1,000 refugees. Receiving no help from King, Wilson tried other tactics but faced the same results. Wilson finally tried to have 100 Jewish orphans admitted to Canada, but Blair's regulations banned all but two of them.[
citation needed]
When
Samuel Bronfman became president of the
Canadian Jewish Congress in 1939 (succeeding Jacobs who served as president of the revived CJC from 1934 until his death in 1938), he worked nonstop along with
David Lewis, the National Secretary of the
Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (a
social democratic political party), the Workmen's Circle and the
Jewish Labour Committee, to make Canada a refuge for the increasingly desperate Jews of Europe.
[11]
In June 1939 Canada and the United States were the last hope for 907 Jewish refugees aboard the steamship
SS St. Louis which had been denied to land in
Havana although the passengers had entry visas. The Canadian government ignored the protests of Canadian Jewish organizations. King said the crisis was not a "Canadian problem" and Blair added in a letter to O.D. Skelton, Undersecretary of State for External Affairs, dated June 16, 1939, "No country could open its doors wide enough to take in the hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who want to leave Europe: the line must be drawn somewhere." The ship finally had to return to Germany.
[12]
“Through government inaction and Blair’s bureaucratic anti-Semitism, Canada emerged from the war with one of the worst records of Jewish refugee resettlement in the world.[
citation needed] Between 1933 and 1939, Canada accepted only 4,000 of the 800,000 Jews who had escaped from Nazi-controlled Europe.”